You love your music, but being able to listen to it just about anywhere isn't always possible. With a few DIY projects, cloud-based music services, and a computer or mobile device, you can change that.

Upload Your Music to the Cloud

In order to stream your music from anywhere, you need to be able to access it from anywhere. The easiest way to do this is with a cloud-based service like Google Play Music or Amazon CloudPlayer. Both services allow you to upload all your songs. Google Play Music has the advantage of being free, but Amazon only charges you $25 a year and will match any music you own with high-quality MP3s. This can save you a lot of time uploading, which is especially helpful when you have a lot of music and/or a slower upstream connection. But if you're willing to pay a fee, you'll also want to consider Spotify. It'll let you stream any music in the Spotify collection from the web, a desktop app, or your mobile device. If you want to listen to songs Spotify doesn't have, you can sync them from your mobile collection. All the services are great and have their own advantages and disadvantages, so choose the one that suits you best.

Alternatively, if you'd just like to roll your own option and your home's upstream connection is fast enough to stream music (it probably is if you have broadband) there are a couple of things you can do. First, you can use Plex. It'll work on practically every desktop and mobile platform and takes minutes to set up. You'll just need to create an account, tell it where your music is, and log into Plex wherever you want to stream the music to. It won't matter if you're on the local network or sitting in your car—it'll stream either way. Alternatively, you can set up a simple web server using WAMP (Windows), MAMP (OS X), or LAMP (Linux) and point its live directory to your music folder. Then you can set it up so you can access your entire collection through a web browser. This isn't quite as robust as Plex and will take a little more work to set up, but it's a very basic way to access your music on almost any computer.

Sync Your Music Across All Your Devices

There will be times your network activity will be limited, or internet access won't be available, so it's good to have a variety of copies of your music on all your devices so you can access it no matter which one you're using. This is easy enough if you're an Apple user and limit yourself to one Mac and any number of iDevices, as iTunes can handle the distribution for you. Many of us have more than one computer, and our mobile devices don't always exist in Apple's ecosystem, so here's what you can do to keep everything in sync easily.

Personally, I like syncing my entire music collection with Dropbox because I can access it from any web browser, several smartphone apps (including the official Dropbox app), and it's always on all of my computers. This option probably won't be free for most, as your music collection will likely exceed the amount of free space you can acquire (even if you're maxing out your options), but you have other options as well. If you use iTunes, MediaRover syncs your collection across all your machines. It's designed to share amongst families, but there's no reason you can't set it up to use all by yourself, with housemates, or whomever else you live with.

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Set Up Streaming Hardware Where You Want It

Streaming music from one device to another, or via the web, is one thing. Getting it to the pair of speakers you want in your house, car, or wherever, is another. To get that set up, you'll need some hardware and most of it is pretty expensive. We like the Apple AirPort Express as an inexpensive music streaming option, as it's only $99 and takes up hardly any space. The new version looks more like an Apple TV and is slightly less-convenient if you're using it just to stream audio, but the good news is you can generally find the old version for $15-20 less. The downside of this hardware is that it really only works with iTunes and other AirPlay-compatible devices, but iTunes is available on Windows and Android has several apps available. If you don't want to buy a bunch of AirPort Express', however, computers and phones work as AirPlay destinations as well—even if both aren't Apple products. You can simply repurpose your old Android phone as a destination for your streaming music and avoid buying any hardware altogether. (You can read more about setting up all your devices for AirPlay here.)